Parents, school officials debate Common Core pros and cons

New Common Core educational standards have affected kids' lives and learning, frustrated parents told the Terrebonne Parish School Board Tuesday.

Mary KilpatrickStaff Writer

New Common Core educational standards have affected kids' lives and learning, frustrated parents told the Terrebonne Parish School Board Tuesday.Tiny children sob over their homework because they just don't understand, educator and parent Pamela Pellegrin said. Third-graders come home with anxiety disorders after school, leaving moms and dads at a loss.“Children are sitting at family tables crying because their little hands hurt from writing assignments,” she said. “Parents are sitting at family tables stressed and crying because they don't even know how to help them with their homework. These are educated parents with college degrees. I'm one of them.” At its most basic level, the Common Core, a set of educational standards adopted by Louisiana and 44 other states, provides a list of skills students should master in each subject before finishing each school year. Students will be expected to learn more-complicated concepts earlier in their school careers and will learn more overall during the course of their K-12 educations.For example, the core standards say a fourth-grader must be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide whole numbers to solve problems, be familiar with factors and multiples, and generate and analyze patterns by year's end.Kids can't keep up with the new workload, Pellegrin said.“A parent of a first-grader today told me that her child had 12 tests in three-and-a-half weeks,” she said.Several School Board members agreed, saying the higher standards rolled out too fast, and kids are struggling to catch up.“I just think it should have been phased in a little better than it has been,” board member Gregory Harding said. “Just to throw this on our kids, I think it's a great mistake.”Harding said common core hit his child's classroom this year. His 7-year-old's school slammed the second grader with new material this year — and gave little room for a learning curve.“I know what Common Core is doing, and I can see a big difference as far as homework they had last year as compared to this year,” he said. “I can honestly say as one individual, being a parent myself, with a degree, it is very hard to try to articulate to them things that they haven't been taught at the beginning.”Local administrators say the Common Core standards are more rigorous than the former state standards. Designers modeled the standards on schools nationwide that performed best on test scores and other measures of learning. They draw partially from international benchmarks to make sure American students are learning as quickly and as much as others.But the standards are designed to leave space for teachers to pick some of their own material. In literature, for example, the standards require teachers to assign books that include certain complex themes and use certain literary devices, but the standards don't prescribe a specific reading list.Some parents say they worry Common Core has changed the books that kids are reading.“Fourth-graders will be learning about Malcolm X, another topic irrelevant for schools,” Montegut parent Vicky Bonvillain said. “I know they are currently studying him, but how is that academic learning? He was a member of the Nation of Islam, a religion that hates not only white people but America as well.”Board member Brenda Babin said she believes there's some confusion about what Common Core is and what it means for students. Common Core acts as an outline for achievement, but teachers control the lesson plans, said Board Member L.P. Bordelon, who supports the new standards.The material was not developed on a federal level but by a coalition of teachers, principals and superintendents across states. Beginning in 2010, each state could opt into the program.Terrebonne's school system has an obligation to use Common Core because state tests “will be based on and envelop common core standards,” Superintendent Philip Martin said. Though he said he understands parents' concerns, it's irresponsible not to teach kids the material.“If they don't pass those tests, many of them don't get promoted,” he said. “It is our obligation instructionally to prepare, as best we can, those kids for those tests.”

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